Public corruption is hardly a new phenomenon, and policymakers have long struggled to find an effective mechanism to deter or punish corruption. While we have recently tried to deal with public corruption through legislation aimed at reducing its incidence, nineteenth-century policymakers adopted a very different tactic. In the nineteenth century, courts used contract law to discourage public corruption by refusing to enforce contracts that they deemed corrupt. Just as they would refuse to enforce contracts for prostitution, they would refuse to enforce contracts between public servants and private entities that undermined the integrity of representative government. In the most striking instance of this practice, the U.S. Supreme Court refused to enforce a contract to lobby Congress, holding that it was a clearly corrupt practice and against the public policy of the United States.

1 comment:

Thanks for the link. I have downloaded and will soon read Prof. Teachout's article. She has written much on corruption. I read earlier this week her Essay "Facts in Exile: Corruption and Abstraction in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission" and it was great. I don't have a direct link but the article appears in Loyola UniversityChicago Law Journal, Vol. 42, 2011, page 295. Before Citizens United came down, Prof. Teachout had been working on a book on corruption for publication in 2010. Apparently Citizens United suggested a rewrite, based upon her papers thereafter. As we have seen post-Citizens United with Super PACs in the current presidential campaign, money does talk and perceptions of corruption may be the result.